Lee’s answer to “Is it normal to be totally confused about what's going on? Because I am.” > Likes and Comments
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IME, the best science fiction may dump you into a world, but gives you enough clues that can start figuring it out as you go, and figuring it out is part of the fun of reading it. I didn't feel that way about Neuromancer. I felt so clueless pretty much all the way through that I couldn't really get invested in figuring it out.
Ah, well. I had no such problems, but not all books work for all people (look at the first few books I tried reading this year!). If you want to give Gibson another try, I suggest looking at his Bigend trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History). They're set in the near past, in our own world, but still science fiction in the sense that we live in an increasingly science fictional world. Gibson's sense of detail wins over all.
I'm doing a reading challenge this year and one of the categories is "another book by an author you didn't previously like, and I was actually on the verge of trying The Peripheral. Would you recommend it?
Yes, but you may find yourself thrown I to another world of weirdness. Even I was a bit confused at first. You have to understand that I'm a diehard Gibson fan, but even I have favorites. The Peripheral is the only one of his I've read just once (so far), and I need to read it again to get a better idea of where I'd put it in the pantheon (so to speak) of his books. Pattern Recognition, though, is by far my favorite, even more than Neuromancer.
Hmm... I may have to search out Pattern Recognition then. My library has the second two books of the trilogy, but not the first! How irritating.
Don't panic...the three books are pretty much standalone, though there is a shared world and a few shared characters, especially between the second and third. Gibson doesn't write series novels as most people think of them. His first nine novels are divided into trilogies more by shared worlds than anything else. (I don't count the book he co-authored with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which doesn't share a universe with anything and which I don't much like). And The Peripheral is either the beginning of a new group of books, or a standalone.
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Amber
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Mar 30, 2016 03:44PM
IME, the best science fiction may dump you into a world, but gives you enough clues that can start figuring it out as you go, and figuring it out is part of the fun of reading it. I didn't feel that way about Neuromancer. I felt so clueless pretty much all the way through that I couldn't really get invested in figuring it out.
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Ah, well. I had no such problems, but not all books work for all people (look at the first few books I tried reading this year!). If you want to give Gibson another try, I suggest looking at his Bigend trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History). They're set in the near past, in our own world, but still science fiction in the sense that we live in an increasingly science fictional world. Gibson's sense of detail wins over all.
I'm doing a reading challenge this year and one of the categories is "another book by an author you didn't previously like, and I was actually on the verge of trying The Peripheral. Would you recommend it?
Yes, but you may find yourself thrown I to another world of weirdness. Even I was a bit confused at first. You have to understand that I'm a diehard Gibson fan, but even I have favorites. The Peripheral is the only one of his I've read just once (so far), and I need to read it again to get a better idea of where I'd put it in the pantheon (so to speak) of his books. Pattern Recognition, though, is by far my favorite, even more than Neuromancer.
Hmm... I may have to search out Pattern Recognition then. My library has the second two books of the trilogy, but not the first! How irritating.
Don't panic...the three books are pretty much standalone, though there is a shared world and a few shared characters, especially between the second and third. Gibson doesn't write series novels as most people think of them. His first nine novels are divided into trilogies more by shared worlds than anything else. (I don't count the book he co-authored with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which doesn't share a universe with anything and which I don't much like). And The Peripheral is either the beginning of a new group of books, or a standalone.
